The NIL Era: Has It Ruined College Football?

The introduction of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) policies in college sports has sparked intense debate and concern. While proponents initially lauded NIL as a long-overdue victory for student-athletes, allowing them to profit from their personal brands, its implementation has revealed deep structural problems. This article delves into the complexities of NIL, examining its negative impacts on college sports and offering a balanced perspective on the issue.

The Core Principle: Athletes Deserve Compensation

The fundamental idea behind NIL remains valid: student-athletes should receive compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness. Before NIL, athletes' primary benefits were athletic scholarships. Researchers found that a student's athletic performance often exceeded the scholarship's monetary value. NIL enables athletes to monetize their performance and personal brand, creating more economic opportunities.

Tony Godsick, Roger Federer’s longtime agent, expressed his reservations about NIL, highlighting potential issues for athletes.

NIL's Slapdash Start

The NIL era began abruptly, lacking proper guidelines and oversight. This rapid transition has led to numerous challenges and controversies. Instead, the NIL era is off to a slapdash start. And I suspect it will take a few more messy years before the turbulence subsides.

The Rise of Collectives: Pay-for-Play in Disguise

One of the most significant issues in the NIL era is the emergence of "collectives." These donor-organized groups pool money to facilitate NIL deals for athletes at specific schools. These collectives have quickly evolved from their original purpose into recruitment vehicles that effectively function as booster-funded payrolls. College football’s biggest donors have orchestrated business ventures distributing five-, six-, and seven-figure payments to athletes under the guise of endorsement opportunities and appearance fees. While technically legal within vague NCAA guidelines, these arrangements clearly violate the spirit of what NIL was supposed to be.

The case of quarterback Nico Iamaleava demonstrates this chaos. After signing with Tennessee on a lucrative NIL deal, he later tried to renegotiate his contract during the offseason. When Tennessee refused both because his performance didn’t warrant the increase and the amount was too high, Iamaleava explored other options. After other schools balked at his demands, he eventually landed at UCLA for significantly less than he had sought. Meanwhile, Texas will spend an astounding $40 million on its football roster. The problem is that if another team wants to compete, there’s only one way forward: pay up. This isn’t about athletes receiving fair compensation for actual marketing value - it’s about wealthy boosters creating slush funds to buy talent.

Boosting Egos Instead of Programs

NIL has become an ego-driven playground for wealthy boosters. For many donors, it’s no longer about supporting their alma mater-it’s about directly influencing outcomes and claiming credit for wins. These boosters are essentially treating college teams like fantasy sports with real money. This creates a dangerous dynamic where the interests of boosters, rather than educational or developmental goals, drive decisions. Coaches find themselves answering not just to athletic directors but also to the whims of deep-pocketed collectives that can control the talent pipeline.

Competitive Imbalance: Widening the Gap

NIL has exacerbated inequality in college sports. Large programs with wealthy donor bases and extensive alumni networks can facilitate multimillion-dollar NIL opportunities that smaller schools simply cannot match. This creates a system where Power 4 conference schools with established donor networks can outbid smaller schools for top talent, wealthy institutions in major markets have inherent advantages, programs without established collectives struggle to compete, and regional disparities widen as schools in wealthier areas secure more NIL resources. Schools with smaller athletic programs may not have the means to facilitate lucrative NIL deals, altering the competitive balance.

Smaller schools face significant challenges in competing with wealthier programs. How will smaller schools ever compete in this environment? When Alabama, Texas, or Ohio State can offer seven-figure NIL packages to high school recruits, what chance does a Mountain West or Sun Belt program have? Even within power conferences, schools in smaller markets or with less passionate donor bases fall further behind.

Granger, the Hampton booster, gave his perspective as a loyal alum looking to help his alma mater, a mid-major school that plays in the Coastal Athletic Association: “Duke is gonna be Duke, Wisconsin’s gonna be Wisconsin, and the ads and TV revenue, all that’s gonna flow in. It looks different for us. … We can’t play in the portal the same way, because we don’t have the same pocket. That’s where the conversation in college sports recruiting has ended up: Can we afford this player?

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Transfer Portal Chaos: The Free Agency Problem

The combination of NIL with the NCAA’s transfer portal has created a virtual free agency system in college sports. Athletes can now enter the portal, field NIL offers from various schools’ collectives, and choose the highest bidder. TCU head football coach Gary Patterson lamented that he risks losing 25 to 30 players per year due to NIL-related transfers. This isn’t hypothetical - it’s happening across college athletics: star players leave smaller programs for bigger NIL opportunities, coaches cannot build programs knowing players may be bought away, team cohesion suffers as players pursue individual financial gain, and smaller schools become de facto farm systems for wealthier programs.

A 2022 survey found that 90% of athletic directors expressed concern about NIL, believing an unregulated NIL market, coupled with transfer rule changes, would lead to more scandals and unfair recruiting tactics. That prediction has proven accurate, as players increasingly make decisions based on financial incentives rather than educational or developmental considerations.

Short-Term Decisions Over Long-Term Development

NIL is pushing young athletes to prioritize immediate financial gain over long-term development. While it’s entirely understandable that a college student might choose the highest paying option-especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds-this short-term focus often works against their best interests. A player might choose a school offering a large NIL package over one with better coaching, development resources, or playing time opportunities. This decision could ultimately harm their professional prospects and earning potential.

What’s worse, many athletes aren’t even receiving the money they were promised. There have been numerous reports of collectives failing to fulfill their financial commitments or inserting predatory clauses into contracts. Young athletes without proper representation find themselves with the short end of the stick, lured by promises that never materialize.

Strained Athlete-Fan Relationship

NIL has fundamentally altered how fans view and interact with college athletes. As players increasingly become paid performers rather than student representatives, fans believe they have the right to treat them like professional athletes-including harsh criticism and social media verbal attacks. “You took the money, now perform” has become the mentality. When a highly compensated player underperforms, they face vicious online harassment from fans who feel entitled to results based on the athlete’s NIL earnings. This toxic environment has mental health implications for young athletes who aren’t emotionally equipped to handle such scrutiny. NIL was supposed to empower athletes, but it’s also subjected them to a new level of public criticism and unreasonable expectations from fans who now view them as paid employees rather than students.

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Corruption and Exploitation: The Dark Side

NIL has opened the door to exploitation of athletes - particularly those without proper guidance. Bloomberg Law reported that college athletes have been hit with a wave of questionable business deals, disreputable agents, and outright scams since NIL began. In one case, a Texas apparel company proposed retaining at least 40% of revenue from merchandise sales under a contract offered to college football players. Ellen Zavian, a professional sports agent and attorney, criticized the lack of oversight for NIL agents: Professional football agents must register with the player’s association, pass a legal examination, and cap their commissions at 3%. By contrast, the most an NIL agent has to do is pay an application fee to the state; there is no limit on their commission rate. Making matters worse, the NCAA prohibits university staff from offering legal advice to students navigating these offers. Lawyers have seen students marooned in bad business contracts with overly broad language, unclear performance requirements, or missing termination clauses.

College Sports’ Identity Crisis

Perhaps the most significant concern with NIL is how it challenges the fundamental identity of college athletics. The line between amateur and professional sports continues to blur, raising existential questions about what college sports should be. The original ethos of college athletics centered on education, character development, and the pursuit of athletic excellence as part of a broader educational experience. NIL has shifted this paradigm toward a more transactional model where athletes are increasingly becoming employees in all but name. This shift isn’t just philosophical - it has practical implications: academic priorities can take a backseat to NIL obligations, team cohesion suffers as individual financial interests diverge, the connection between athletes and their institutions weakens, and the public perception of college sports changes from amateur competition to minor league professional sports. When players are choosing schools based on financial offers from collectives rather than education, coaching, or program fit, we’ve fundamentally altered what college sports represent.

Impact on International Student-Athletes

One overlooked consequence of NIL is its impact on international student-athletes. Because of visa restrictions, many international students can’t participate in NIL activities without risking their immigration status. This creates an inherently unfair two-tiered system where American athletes can profit from their name, image, and likeness, while international teammates cannot. Beyond the financial disadvantage, this disparity can cause resentment and division within teams.

The Sluka Saga

No incident has grabbed mainstream attention quite like the saga of Matthew Sluka, the UNLV quarterback who had the Rebels off to a 3-0 start when he suddenly announced he would sit for the rest of the season due to “certain representations that were made to me” by the school and its NIL collective. As emerged over the course of a frenzied news cycle, Sluka, his agent, and his father believe he was promised $100,000 from the school in NIL money and never got it (but the deal was never in writing). Baker, giving the Duke perspective, said, “When you’re making these promises to these athletes and families, the collective has to be in a lot of ways a reflection of what you’re telling them on a day-to-day basis.

Distinguishing NIL from Pay-for-Play

Recent rule changes in college sports have created uncertainty, largely due to confusion between name, image and likeness (NIL) and pay-for-play. NIL allows athletes to be paid for commercial use of their identity, while pay-for-play is compensation for on-field performance. Current NIL regulations are criticized for restricting athletes' opportunities rather than protecting them or the integrity of the sport. When a young actor appears in a national commercial, for example, no one questions whether he should be paid. When a teenager performs on a field and generates millions in media revenue, the debate suddenly becomes moral rather than economic.

The system isn’t protecting the game. It’s protecting outdated comfort zones. The result, where we stand, is a system that's supposed to protect athletes while simultaneously restricting their ability to operate as individuals within a commercial marketplace.

The Financial Realities

College athletic departments face real financial challenges. In 2023, the median Division I athletic department posted a $22 million net loss, even as media rights revenue at the highest levels of college athletics continues to grow. Revenue sharing obligations, legal settlements and escalating coaching salaries have increased the strain. What is missing from many of these discussions is the athlete’s perspective. Decisions are being made about compensation models, roster limits, enforcement mechanisms and competitive equity with surprisingly little input from the student-athletes whose careers and livelihoods are directly affected.

Athletes' Perspective

Advocating for athletes does not mean ignoring the economic realities facing schools or halting policy decisions. It means addressing them honestly. If universities choose to participate in revenue-sharing models, that compensation should be transparent, equitable and clearly separated from endorsement activity. NIL should remain what it was intended to be: a student-athlete’s opportunity to build a personal brand and right to participate in the commercial economy like any other individual with market value. It also means rethinking how value is created and distributed across college sports. Football and men’s basketball drive the majority of revenue, but they are not the sole sources of institutional value.

Olympic and women’s sports contribute to university enrollment, alumni engagement, brand identity and global visibility. So creating holistic opportunities across sports is paramount in elevating an individual school’s profile as well as the broader system. Viewing these programs solely as cost centers reflects a strategic decision rather than an unavoidable financial reality. Further, many schools possess decades of intellectual property that remains underutilized. Archives, historic footage, alumni storytelling and media content can be activated responsibly to create sustainable revenue streams that support broad-based athletic programs.

The Path Forward: Reform Is Possible

Despite these significant concerns, the solution isn’t necessarily to abolish NIL entirely. Athletes do deserve fair compensation for legitimate marketing opportunities. The current system, however, requires substantial reform: Federal legislation for uniform standards, clear collective and booster regulations, equitable revenue-sharing models, enhanced athlete protection and education, and reasonable compensation caps are needed to fix NIL’s broken system and preserve college sports’ integrity.

Successfully implementing these approaches requires patience and long-term thinking, supported by consistent leadership. The current moment does not call for rolling back athlete rights or blaming NIL for systemic shortcomings. It calls for clarity. Clear distinctions between endorsement rights and compensation. Clear governance structures that reflect the modern and evolving sports economy. Clear recognition that athletes are not a problem to be managed ‒ but stakeholders to be respected. College sports will not stabilize by talking over athletes or regulating around them.

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